DUCE9- Hip-Hop, Parties, & Community

Tucson, Arizona is a classically weird place, as Arizona’s first incorporated city in 1877, it has plenty of old-school creepy desert town vibes, mixed with a modern college town twist. The University of Arizona hosts 25,ooo students. It’s an amazing breeding ground for creativity and the home of local (currently) rapper DUCE9. DUCE has been making music non-stop for about 3 years. We recently caught up with him to talk about that and his other recent endeavors. In 2017 he worked on a stylish project called “Paradox” with other local artists. He had this to tell us about it.

“A lot of songs on ‘Paradox’ talk about some really deep things, especially ‘Sidewalk To My Grave’, and another song I did with J Reece called ‘Ajo’. I wrote these songs because I was at a time in my life I didn’t really give a f$!&ck about most things, except for weed. Being down and depressed helped me express my feelings verbally through music and give me a platform to channel my emotion. The music spoke to me soooo much, especially when the days were tough, I would just turn up my favorite song and drown out everything. But most importantly I found an escape.. anger, depression, and anxiety have been the default setting in my life. And I choose to talk about the dark deep stuff in my songs and what I go through to let it out.”

Duce was recently signed with “Vision That Ent” by Zee Shaof & Renk Remy who signed him after meeting him at the 2017 Arizona hip-hop festival. Zee & Renk have an album dropping Feb 24th with Duce’s full-length project scheduled shortly after. He’s also been working as an assistant with the GLDN Artist group– a solid collection of Southwest artist also known for throwing raucous parties.

“One of the things that influence me the most is the faces and the people I meet who have some type of relation to my lyrics. That’s my favorite. I’ve also been doing some work in the community. I work with the United youth Leadership council in Tucson and recently became an official board member. I got a lot of exciting things still to come. Most importantly, I wanna remain humble and give back through hip-hop and be a very influential piece of a big puzzle.”

DUCE9 definitely remains humble. He spent some of his formidable years being raised by the man who once freestyled for 24hrs straight, the infamous MURS. As proud of that as he is, he doesn’t bring it up if you don’t as he says he wants to stand on his own name. Commendable as fuck. DUCE’s newest track is called “Disposition” you can keep up with him here.